Man Down

In case you have not already heard the story of the event that started all of this, or if you happen to be one of the increasing numbers of people for whom I have selfishly invented a narrative that involved snowboarding, skydiving, or running in front of a bus to save a crowd of children, following is a brief summary of the actual details as I remember them.

The Christmas festivities were essentially finished. Weeks of preparation had unwound just as planned over the course of an unusually beautiful December day and most of the twenty or so guests had visited, eaten, exchanged and opened gifts, and said their goodbyes. I retired the five cd’s of Christmas music that had been in repeated rotation for the entire day and dropped in some Earth Wind and Fire. It was around 9 pm and a few of us were in the family room, dancing around the tree when I jokingly requested of my wife that she not “get too grindy” with me given the present company. I should point out here that this off-handed comment had no real justification or cause, nor did it have any intentional impact on the developing plot, but none the less it unexpectedly became the catalyst for the next few critical frames of the evening.

In the following moment I began to turn to my left, thinking that everything was all well and good in Christmas dance party land but in response to the grindy comment, my wife had already launched an impossibly advanced and tragically ill-fated rodeo maneuver, deciding in a whim of festive holiday spirit to jump up and onto the front of me. The move would surely have been mildly amusing and would have fit right in with the feel of the carefree scene had it not been for the destruction that resulted. Before I realized what had happened the impact of her slightly off center, thigh-high arrival had deflected my right leg inward, rearward, and downward in a textbook combination of forces that instantly hyperextended my knee and drove my femur off the tibia and into the next zip code. She managed to break her fall to the floor using the back of her head and I somehow landed on top of her, my knee awkwardly snapping back into place as I instinctively curled my body toward a fetal position. She was definitely going to be left with a generous headache but I could tell by the searing surge of pain and by the speed with which the blood was rushing away from my face and hands that something inside my knee had gone very wrong.


I desperately pulled myself up on the couch and summoned for a bag of ice and a bottle of Advil. For the next few hours I did my best to cover the pain and think good thoughts as I winced and twitched and fought off recurring waves of nausea. When I finally got off the couch I was able to hobble very slowly and gingerly for about ten steps but when I got to the kitchen my knee bent backward with no sign of warning or resistance, sending me crashing onto the counter and into my first true realization that whatever was wrong was definitely not going to fix itself. With that I finally gave in and was driven to the local ER just before midnight. There we found out that the MRI machine has evenings off so they gave me a set of crutches and a straight leg brace and told me that I had better call an orthopedic specialist in the morning.

The next day I began my journey toward a painfully detailed understanding of the human knee, and what it really means to destroy one.